Mancini

In Italian mancino is the left-handed man, and the surname is one of the plainest remarks the language ever fixed on a person: the neighbour who reached with the wrong hand, in a world where the Latin sinister meant both left and unlucky. To be the mancino was to be set a little apart. The naming system files it with Rossi, the redhead, among surnames taken from a physical attribute, and Mancino and Manca preserve the same observation in other spellings. Nothing in it is regional or dynastic: any parish with a left-hander and two men called Giovanni could produce the byname.

That matters, because Mancini is also the name of one of the oldest houses of Roman nobility, and the two are not the same thing. The great majority of people called Mancini descend from a village nickname arrived at independently up and down the peninsula, not from that house. The house claims a different road to the name: descent from the gens Hostilia, whose line took the cognomen Mancinus, and through it back to Lucius Hostilius Mancinus, consul in 145 BC and a commander of the Roman fleet in the Third Punic War. That is a pedigree the family asserts of itself, and it is worth reading as one.

The documented house begins with Lucio Mancini, recorded living in 990, and stays close to the government of the city thereafter. Many of its members served as Conservatori all'Urbe, and in Rome the family answered to a second name, de Lucij or simply Lucij, taken from the fish on its coat of arms. The humanist Marco Antonio Altieri (1457-1537) entered them in Li Nuptiali, his important collection of news about sixteenth-century Rome: not princes, but a family a chronicler of the city had to account for.

Branches spread out from Rome. At Fermo the first memories of the name go back to 1160, and there the Mancini gave the town Priori, Consoli, Gonfalonieri and Dottori, the whole ladder of communal office. Two lines outgrew the others, the Sicilian and the one that ended in France. The city kept the stonework: Mancini Palace and the Mancini de Lucij Palace both stand in Rome, and the family was granted the Honneurs de la Cour of France.

The Sicilian Mancini arrive in two waves, and the account of the first is the older and shakier: tradition has Giacomo Mancini leaving for the island in 1256 to escape the persecutions of Vitelleschi. From him the Barons of Tardello, Tumminii and Ogliastro are said to descend, three baronies in one line, and that line was extinguished in the seventeenth century.

The second wave is better anchored, and came with a post: Francesco Mancini, a kinsman of Cardinal Giulio Mazzarino, went to Catania in the seventeenth century as Attorney-General to Prince Marco Antonio Colonna and his wife Isabella Gioeni. The family took root firmly enough that the town council later dedicated streets and squares to it, and the branch still carries the old Roman alias in its surname: Mancini de Lucij.

Paolo Mancini (1580-1637) founded the Accademia degli Umoristi, the Roman literary academy attended by Giovanni Battista Guarini, Gian Battista Marino and Alessandro Tassoni. It put the name in the room where Roman letters were argued out.

His son Lorenzo (1602-1650) was a Roman baron who practised as a necromancer and an astrologer, and it was his marriage that turned the family's fortunes: his wife was Girolama Mazzarini, sister of Cardinal Mazarin. When Lorenzo died, his widow took their children to Paris in the hope of using her famous brother's influence to make advantageous marriages for them. Few such plans have worked as thoroughly.

The Roman half did well without leaving. Cardinal Francesco Maria Mancini (1606-1672) was an important figure in the election of Pope Alexander VII.

Girolama's daughters became the most conspicuous sisters in seventeenth-century Europe. Laura (1636-1657) married Louis de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, and was the mother of the famous French general Louis Joseph de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme. Olympia (1638-1708) married Eugène-Maurice of Savoy-Carignano and was the mother of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the famous Austrian general. Two grandsons of a Roman baron's widow grew up to command armies, one for France and one for Austria.

Marie (1639-1715) married Lorenzo Colonna and was the first romantic love of King Louis XIV. Marie Anne (1649-1714) married Maurice Godefroy de la Tour d'Auvergne, duc de Bouillon, a nephew of the field marshal Turenne, and became a patroness of Racine and La Fontaine.

Hortense (1646-1699), the beauty of the family, did the boldest thing any of them did. She escaped her abusive husband, Armand-Charles de la Porte, duc de La Meilleraye, and went to London, where she became the mistress of King Charles II. She reached a court by her own decision rather than by family arrangement.

Their brother did as well. Philippe Mancini (1641-1707) was nominated Duke of Nevers and Donzy by his uncle Cardinal Mazarin in 1660, and the grant carried the prerogative to strike coins. He was a knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit and Lieutenant of the First Company of Musketeers of the King, and the officer who succeeded him in that command was the Count D'Artagnan.

His grandson Louis-Jules Mancini-Mazarini, duc de Nivernais (1716-1798), carried the compound surname and the full accumulation: Prince of Vergagne and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, knight of the Golden Fleece and of the Holy Spirit, general, diplomat and writer. Written out, the house's titles read like a map of the old European order: French Peer and Spanish Grandee, Viscount of Clamecy, Lord of Claye-Souilly, Roman noble and Venetian patrician, with the style of Serene Highness. The family's coat of arms inspired the heraldry of the French commune of Liernais.

A separate line went south. Domenico Nicola Mancini was named Marquis of Fusignano by Prince Francesco of Este, and moved to the Kingdom of Naples in 1527. The marquisate descended with his heirs, and in 1745 Pope Benedict XIV granted the title of Count Mancini to Domenico Nicola III, the fifth marquis.

The line's largest figure belongs to the making of modern Italy. Count Pasquale Stanislao Mancini (1817-1888), eighth Marquis of Fusignano, was a jurist and a writer, and he served three times as a minister of the Kingdom of Italy, holding public education, justice and foreign affairs. A house that had collected its titles from popes and princes now put a minister into an elected state.

The San Vittore line is a subline of the Naples branch, named for San Vittore del Lazio, the hamlet where it held wide lands. The sources date its founding twice, to Count Antonio Mancini in 1800 and to Count Antonio Filippo Luigi (1824-1890), a first lieutenant of the Neapolitan Army. His son Giuseppe Alessandro Luigi (1852-1903), a Belle Epoque dandy, married donna Maria Antonietta Marinelli (1862-1911) in 1882 and had seven children with her, among them Carlo Alberto Antonio (1883-1940), a horse owner.

Carlo Alberto's son Antonio Eugenio Andrea (1915-1990) had the hardest war in the family's record. An officer of the Italian Army, he was aide-de-camp to Marshal Rodolfo Graziani in 1938 and fought with the VIII Army Corps on the Greek-Albanian front. In 1943 the Germans caught him in Yugoslavia and confined him at Hohenstein in Saxony. He escaped, and he was awarded the Military Cross. His son, Count Adriano Fulvio Mario Mancini, born in 1952, breeds Arabian horses and works in advertising.

Outside the house, the name belongs to the great many who came by it the ordinary way, a left-handed ancestor at a time. The best known of them is the footballer and coach Roberto Mancini, of Sicilian descent. His surname records the same remark about somebody's left hand that the dukes of Nevers carried; no record links the two. Both are Mancini; only one line ever put a fish on a shield.